SEO

While achieving the highest ranks possible is certainly a goal of SEO, and doing your utmost to generate sales or increase page views from visitors is very important, there is a much neglected area inbetween - who your site appears in the Google search results.

Some great tactics are detailed at SEOptimise.com, including:

• using special characters¥
• being reviewed at StumbleUpon
• having shorter titles and snippets
• create white space via perfect snippet lengths

These and the other dozen tactics all increase your organic click-through rate (CTR), and this may lead to an increase in rank.

While it is generally true that having lots of links pointing to your site will improve its ranking in Google, there is a lot more to it. To make it difficult for the system to be gamed, Google almost certainly have models of linking that represent the patterns and time-scales expected from genuinely popular sites.

Here are some quick tips intended to make to think about your linking strategies a bit deeper:

Numbers: most incoming links should be from low PageRank sites. This is because most sites out there have a low PageRank. If the only incoming links come from high PageRank sites, Google will smell something fishy. Ideally for every link you get from a PR5+ site, you should have dozens or even hundreds from sites with lower PR.

Pattern: chicken or egg? A recent post at Digerati suggests that the optimal pattern is to get a link from a highly trusted resource first (even if you put there yourself), and then get lots of “run of the mill” links. This feels natural - following the initial exposure on a trustworthy site, many people decided to also make a link.

Otherwise, if hundreds of “run of the mill” links suddenly appear, and Google cannot plainly see how they heard of you, it might look spammy.

Time: take plenty of it. This isn’t always an option, but slow organic growth will seem more genuine. A site that grows by 2 pages a week will be more trustworthy than one that has 1000 pages on day one. The former will seem like a site belonging to someone with a love of the topic, whereas the latter looks like they are on a mission to get search traffic.

The same goes with links. If your site appears in 500 directories overnight, you obviously used a submission service. Link building should be as slow and steady as you can tolerate.

This is a great example of how powerful having keywords in your URL can be. Compassive has applied some basic SEO principles to our Nintendo e-commerce site, nintendo-shop.co.uk, and when combined with the keywords in the domain name, we are outranking Nintendo themselves.

A Google UK search for “nintendo shop” has the Compassive site at #1, followed by Nintendo, Amazon, Nintendo and Kelkoo.

Using keyword-laden domain names, and white-label shopping sites or WordPress templates, can often provide more sales or leads than SEM keyword purchases.